The same principle of a solely local and visible mode of presence results in a polemic against the Lutheran doctrine of the Lord’s Supper on the part of the Reformed which is untruthful through and through. Because the Reformed, the moment they hear of a true presence of Christ’s body and blood in the Sacrament, always visualize only their visible and local presence, “as the peasant fills out jacket and breeches,” they ascribe to us Lutherans a local inclusion (localis inclusio, Hodge, Syst. Theol., I, 83) of the body of Christ in the bread, or a local consubstantiation (consubstantiatio), or even a physical compounding (permixtio) of bread and body of Christ.

Because of the same bias they apply to us Lutherans the titles “carnivorous beasts,” “blood guzzlers,” and “cannibals,”50 and call the Supper instituted by Christ, with the real presence of the body and blood of Christ which is given and shed for us, a “Cyclopean meal” and a “Thyestean banquet.”51 All this is the result of their adoption of the thesis that Christ’s body can have only a visible and local mode of presence as their principle of Scripture interpretation.2


50 Zwingli is one of the coarsest blasphemers, as his De vera et falsa religione (Opp. II, 555), shows. He proves the absence of Christ’s body and blood from the Sacrament not merely with the words (John 6:63), “The flesh profiteth nothing,” but also with the words of Peter at the miraculous draught of fishes (Luke 5:8), “Depart from me … O Lord.”

These words of Peter, flowing from his realization of his sinfulness, induce Zwingli to give the following instruction on the Lord’s Supper: “And we are to have appetite to eat Christ in a natural manner, as cannibals (anthropophagi) do? As though somebody could so love his children that he would wish to devour (devorare) them! Or as though among, all men those who devour human flesh were not regarded as the most savage.”

Also Oecolampadius, whom the Reformed praise for his dignified manner of fighting Luther (R. E., 2d ed., X, 722), uses the above expressions in his answer to Luther s preface to the Syngramma (St. L. XX:588 ff.).

The coarsest Reformed opponent was perhaps Beza. Even Heppe, a great admirer of Beza, concedes (R. E., 2d ed., II, 361): “Beza in 1560 opposed Tilemann Hesshusius, a defender of the Lutheran doctrine, with two dialogues, of which he called the one ‘Cannibalism’ or ‘The Cyclop,’ the other ‘The Scolding Ass’ or ‘Sophist,’ both of which unfortunately were overflowing with boundless scorn and ridicule.”

It is principally Beza whom the Formula of Concord has in mind in pointing out “how unjustly and maliciously the Sacramentarian fanatics (Theodore Beza) deride the Lord Christ, St. Paul, and the entire Church in calling this oral partaking, and that of the unworthy, duos pilos caudae equinae et commentum, cuius vel ipsum Satanam pudeat, as also the doctrine concerning the majesty of Christ, excrementum Satanae, quo diabolus sibi ipsi et hominibus illudat, that is, they speak so horribly of it that a godly Christian man should be ashamed to translate it” (Trigl. 997, Sol. Decl., VII, 67).

51The legendary Cyclopes were pictured as cannibals (of. Homer, Od. IX, 287 ff.; Virgil, Aen. III, 623 ff.). Thyestes ate the flesh of his own son, served him by his brother Aetreus (cf. Cicero, Tusc., III, 12, 26).

2 Francis Pieper, Christian Dogmatics, electronic ed., vol. 3 (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1953), 326–327.